Artica Proxy (artica-proxy.com) is a web proxy and filtering appliance that a company installs on its own server, from an ISO file or a virtual machine image. It filters, caches and logs the users' web traffic. Artica Tech, a French company registered in 2012, makes it and sells no proxy addresses. About 390 people a month search Google for "artica proxy". Below are what it does, how its licences work and what they cost, what other pages say about it and the self-hosted replacements.
What Artica is
Artica began as an open-source project in 2004, and the French register lists ARTICA TECH (SIREN 752855866), created on 20 July 2012 in Orgerus, west of Paris, and active. Its site claims "More than 100 000" installed servers. The older artica-proxy.com, which carries the product's name in its address, says 62,000 and "a starting price of just 99€".
The appliance covers an HTTP, HTTPS and FTP proxy with SSL inspection, Kerberos and Active Directory sign-in, caching, URL filtering by category and antivirus scanning through ClamAV. It also runs DNS, DHCP, a firewall, intrusion detection, reverse proxies and an SMTP gateway. Version 4.50 comes as ISO files for Debian 13 (1.6 GB), Debian 12 and Debian 10. Its proxy page still reads "Artica V4 is an appliance based on Debian 10 Operating system", and Debian's long-term support for Debian 10 ended on 30 June 2024.
The licence page of artica-proxy.com calls Artica open source under GPL3, and its appliances can be opened over SSH. The source repository linked from articatech.com was last updated on 19 December 2023 and carries no licence file that GitHub can read.
Community and Enterprise
Artica's two editions, October 2026
| Feature | Community | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | By quote, per year |
| Proxy service | No limit | No limit |
| Filtering categories | Paid only | Included |
| Active Directory | Paid only | Included |
| Statistics and logs | 5 days | Unlimited |
| Cluster, reverse proxies, WAF | Paid only | Included |
| Professional support | None | Included |
wiki.articatech.com/license/overview and articatech.com/about-artica.php, read from our server on 13 October 2026
DNS, DHCP, the firewall, intrusion detection, routing and the LDAP and MySQL databases stay free in Community mode. The older licence page on artica-proxy.com describes a Community edition with Active Directory for 30 days, 1,300,000 categorised sites out of 34,000,000 and one cache of 2 GB; the current wiki gives no such figures.
What the licences cost
The Enterprise licence is "a subscription based per year / server and users", by quote, with education prices from $150. Users are counted as signed-in users, or MAC addresses, or client IP addresses, averaged per week. Within 20% over the count, a warning appears. Beyond it, the wiki says, "the bandwidth of the server will be reduced to 1mb/s" until an administrator unlocks it, each hour for a day. Each server checks in with Artica's licence server over port 443.
A Gold licence lifts the limit on servers within its user count, adds every extra and works without the licence server. A Regional Governmental licence covers a public body and all its subdivisions; the wiki's example, a county in Oregon, comes to about $26,000 a year. Sales in Malaysia go through an exclusive partner, Fronix. The "French professional support" link leads to a web host's placeholder page on articabox.fr, last changed in October 2021.
What other pages say about Artica
- DistroWatch lists Artica, submitted on 19 February 2012, among distributions "considered dormant or discontinued". Its VMware appliance on Debian 13 is dated 13 July 2026.
- LinuxFr (24 May 2012) announced 20 million categorised sites, and its editors noted a BSD licence. Artica's proxy page now claims more than 55 million sites, and artica-proxy.com names GPL3.
- Server Fault (11 February 2020): an administrator who inherited an Artica proxy found none of the requested sites in its exported logs and asked how to trace the client. It drew one answer.
- Server Fault (6 August 2022): a keepalived pair on Artica's Debian 10 build kept both nodes as master. It drew no answer.
- artica-proxy.com, Artica's own older site, still quotes "a starting price of just 99€", "62 000 active servers" and Active Directory from 2003 to 2012R2.
Self-hosted replacements
Self-hosted proxy and filtering options, October 2026
| Option | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Squid | Caching proxy, GPL-2.0 | 7.7, 24 August 2026 |
| e2guardian | Content filter, GPL-2.0 | 5.5.9, 22 August 2025 |
| OPNsense | Firewall with a Squid plugin | Plugin 1.4 |
| pfSense | Firewall from Netgate | Squid packages deprecated |
squid-cache.org, docs.netgate.com and GitHub (squid-cache, e2guardian, opnsense/plugins), read from our server on 13 October 2026
Squid is the proxy and cache at the base of most of these, and its site says its developers "can only support the latest stable version". e2guardian adds content filtering and works as a proxy, a transparent proxy or an ICAP server. OPNsense moved Squid out of its core into a plugin built from its 23.7.12 code; version 1.4 of the plugin answered SQUID-2025:2, rated CVE 10.0.
Netgate's documentation marks the Squid, SquidGuard and Lightsquid packages of pfSense as deprecated "due to many unfixed upstream security vulnerabilities". It says they "will no longer function in future major releases" and strongly recommends uninstalling them.
Where HProxy fits
We sell a different kind of proxy: addresses on other networks that your traffic leaves through, for scraping, testing and seeing a site from another country. Residential traffic starts at $0.44 per GB, and datacenter addresses cost $1.58 per IP a month. For filtering and caching an office's own browsing, the self-hosted tools above are the right kind.
Which one to pick
- Artica Community for a free gateway with a web interface, if 5 days of logs and no filtering categories are enough.
- Artica Enterprise for categories, Active Directory and support, after a quote; count your users first, since an overrun throttles the server.
- Squid with e2guardian for a free, hand-built proxy and filter.
- OPNsense with its Squid plugin for a firewall and proxy on one machine.
- pfSense users with the Squid packages: plan the move before the next major release.
What we could not find out
We installed nothing, so performance, the interface and the quality of the filtering are unknown. The Enterprise price per user comes only by quote. Whether Community still limits Active Directory to 30 days rests on the older site alone, and we found no working page for French support. Artica's licence wiki, download page and the replacements' release pages get another look by 13 January 2027.
Sources
- articatech.com (home, About Artica-Proxy, About Artica, downloads, the Malaysian partner page) and artica-proxy.com (home and licence page), read from our server on 13 October 2026.
- wiki.articatech.com: the licence overview, the Gold and Regional Governmental licences and the proxy service page, the same day.
- The French company register (recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr) for ARTICA TECH and Verisign's records for articatech.com and artica-proxy.com, 13 October 2026.
- GitHub records of Artica's source repository, Squid, e2guardian and the OPNsense plugins, and Debian's release page for Debian 10, 13 October 2026.
- DistroWatch, LinuxFr (24 May 2012) and two Server Fault questions (2020 and 2022, through Stack Exchange's public API), read 13 October 2026.
- squid-cache.org and Netgate's documentation on its cache and proxy packages, 13 October 2026.
- Search counts for Artica and the self-hosted proxies from Google Keyword Planner, worldwide, 13 October 2026.
- HProxy's residential and datacenter prices, inserted from our live price data.
